This was an astonishingly powerful and moving piece of work. Highly autobiographical, it charts the experience of a refugee in today’s world. In this case, from Afghanistan but the experiences are universal. When it starts, the main character seems to be ‘in a good place’ with a partner, settled in Denmark and about to buy a country cottage. But we then see him starting to talk to a psychiatrist and going back to his earliest memories growing up in Kabul just before the Russians left and as these scenes unfold, we see and experience the extraordinary journey, mentally and physically, he has taken to be where he is now and as he revisits and retells his experiences, so he, slowly, begins to come to terms with his experiences. The other factor that he has to deal with – and it is only one other element in his story – is his being gay and the problems that he himself has with that. This side of his life is, in one way, almost only glancingly dealt with (th is emphatically NOT a film about being gay/growing up gay/coming to terms with b gay etc. etc.) rather just one more element in his life that he has to cope with. But it is nevertheless very powerful and moving – and at times slightly comic as when, once safely in Denmark he solemnly asks for ‘medicine’ as he does not want to be gay. And his much older brother who left Afghanistan when due for National Service a number of years ago, has the most marvelously and heart-warming reaction and action which I will not spoil by divulging.
Visually and stylistically the film is fascinating as there the more traditional line animation makes up the majoprity of the visual aesthetic of the film but interspersed with this are clips of actual film footage from the time and places dealt with – sparingly used but all the more effective for that – and in a very few places, the parts of his life often with the highest trauma level, the ‘look’ becomes almost abstract with shady shapes in shades of grey and black. Again the fact that this is used thoughtfully sparingly makes it all the more powerful.
An absolute must-see – not least by politicians and anyone involved in refugee work.